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CHAPTER EIGHT
‘A STORM IN a teacup but it’s put my father in a real rage.’ Raj expelled a stark breath, impatience and exasperation lacing his intonation. ‘Last year my father drove Maraban’s only gossip magazine out of the country. Now they’re based in Dubai and what they publish about us has steadily become more shocking. He should’ve left them alone. He has to accept that these days everything we do is watched and reported on and our family cannot hope to keep secrets the way we did when he was a boy.’
‘I guess he’s a bit behind the times. The press are more disrespectful of institutions nowadays. So, what’s in that magazine?’ she prompted, thoroughly puzzled. ‘Some forgotten scandal?’
‘Not even a scandal, merely an intrusion.’ He had crushed the magazine between his hands and now he smoothed it out with difficulty and handed it to her. ‘Of course, you can’t read it but the photos are self-explanatory and this article coming out the same week as our wedding, suggesting that I wasn’t allowed to marry the woman I loved because she was a commoner, may be embarrassing for my father but it is also an absurd allegation.’
Dry-mouthed now, Zoe stared down at the splash of photographs, depicting Raj with Nabila. Old photos, of course. She could see that they were younger but what she had not been prepared to see was the look of adoration in Raj’s face as he gazed down at the other woman. He was studying Nabila as if she’d hung the moon for him and for some reason, Zoe registered, seeing those youthful carefree photos of them holding hands, larking about beside a fountain and smiling at each other hurt. She couldn’t explain why those photos hurt but the instant she scrutinised them in detail she felt as though someone had punched her hard in the stomach because the pain was almost physical in its intensity.
What the heck was wrong with her? Was she starting to care for Raj? Was she suffering from jealousy, despite her earlier reassurance to him that she felt no such emotion concerning him? Those questions made her feel as shaky as if the ground had suddenly disappeared from under her feet. Yes, she was starting to care in the way you did begin to care more for someone when you got closer to them, she reasoned frantically and, yes, she had been jealous when she saw those photos. But none of that meant that she was necessarily falling for him.
‘She was my first love and that was all,’ Raj continued, wonderfully impervious to his bride’s pallor and her silence. ‘Very few people marry their first love and what does it matter anyway what I was doing eight years ago? It’s a really stupid article but it is revealing a relationship that only our families knew about to the public. What I can’t understand is how they got a hold of such private photos. I had copies but I destroyed them after we parted and the friend who took the photos—Omar—would never have shared them with anyone.’
‘You said it was an absurd allegation,’ Zoe recalled dully. ‘How so when it’s true? Your father wouldn’t agree to you marrying her.’
‘Not because of her parentage but because I suspect he had had her checked out and knew a great deal more about her than I knew at the time,’ Raj admitted wryly. ‘At least he had the consideration not to throw what he had found out in my face.’
‘As you said...a storm in a teacup,’ Zoe remarked rather stiffly, because all of a sudden she was tired of hearing about anything that related to Nabila and she could only marvel at her previous curiosity. Just then she thought she would be happier if she never heard the wretched woman’s name spoken out loud again. As for seeing those stupid photos of her with Raj regarding her as if he had been poleaxed, well, that had been anything but a pleasure for a woman already labelled as a friend with benefits. No doubt that was why she had felt envious of the other woman.
No doubt, right at this very moment Raj was thinking about Nabila, remembering how much he had loved and wanted her, positively wallowing in sentimental memories! And on that note, Zoe decided that she would be very, very tired that night, in fact throughout the day, so that Raj would not dare to think she was in the mood to provide any of those benefits he had mentioned!
* * *
‘You still haven’t told me how it happened,’ Raj reminded Zoe stubbornly.
Raj was like a dog with a bone when he wanted information, he just kept on landing back on that same avoidance spot of hers, an area of memory where she never ever travelled if she could help it. She breathed in deep, a little bit of a challenge when he was still flattening her to the wall of the shower. Shower sex? Yes, she had gained a lot of experience she had never expected to have over the past two weeks. Resolving to keep her paws off Raj hadn’t worked when he was behaving like lover of the year. It was the only analogy she could make when she refused to let herself think of him as a husband.
But there it was: her watch broke, so a new one studded with diamonds arrived within the hour; phone kept on running out of charge, and a new phone was there by bedtime so that she could talk to her sisters as usual. She preferred flowers growing in the ground to those cut off in their prime and stuffed for a short shelf life into vases, and so he took her into the hills of Bania to stage a luxury picnic beside a glorious field of wild flowers. That had been only one of the blinders Raj had played over the past fortnight. He hated her high heels, seemed to be convinced she was going to plunge down steps and, at the very least, break her neck, but he had still bought her shoes, the dreamiest, absolutely over-the-top jewel-studded sandals with soaring heels. She had worn them out to dinner last night in a little mountainside inn, where everyone around them had pretended—not very well—not to know who they were to give them their privacy.
The only problem for Zoe, who was blossoming in receipt of such treatment, was that it was a constant battle not to start caring too much about Raj. She kept on reminding herself that none of this was real. Yes, he was her husband, but this was a convenient arrangement that they’d both agreed to. At best, he was just a friend, an intimate friend certainly, but beyond that she knew she dared not go. She was terrified of falling for him and if she made that mistake, she would be rejected and her heart would be broken.
‘Zoe...’ Raj growled, nipping a teasing trail across the soft skin of her n
ape to her shoulder with his lips and his teeth, sending a shudder of response through her that even very recent fulfilment could not suppress. ‘I want to know how it happened.’
‘And I don’t want to revisit it.’
‘It would be healthier for you to talk about it,’ Raj told her doggedly.
‘Like you talk about being bullied at military school!’ Zoe flung even as she wriggled back into his lean, powerful body, registering that he was ready to go again while conceding that there was nothing new about that because Raj appeared to be insatiable. ‘I practically had to cut the story out of you with a knife at your throat,’ she reminded him with spirit. ‘And by the way, Raj, it wasn’t bullying. What you and Omar went through was abuse of the worst kind!’
‘If I talked you can talk too,’ Raj traded, running a long-fingered hand down over her spine, setting her alight without hesitation.
‘This is sexual torture,’ she told him shakily.
‘All you have to do is say no,’ Raj whispered, nipping at the soft lobe of her ear, flipping her long hair over his shoulder as he had learned to do, lost in the magic of her and her response for, as he had learned, it was enthralling to have that much power over a woman, as long as he never ever looked at the other side of the coin and acknowledged the reality that it was mutual.
Zoe straightened her shoulders and breathed, ‘Right... I’m saying no...but you’re not allowed to look at me like that!’
‘Like what?’ Raj prompted.
Those stunning dark silvered eyes of his shimmered with hunger and a tiny hint of hurt, and even a hint of hurt on show grabbed Zoe’s heart hard and squeezed the breath out of her. She wanted him; every time she looked at him she wanted him.
But that was fine, absolutely fine, she told herself soothingly. It was just sex. She’d had a friend at university who went on a girls’ holiday once purely to have sex with a lot of different men. That had been Claire’s idea of fun: Raj was Zoe’s idea of fun. And the world of sensual freedom she had learned to explore with Raj was the best reward of all. After the shocking attack she had survived as an adolescent, she had never dreamt that she could aspire to such freedom in her own body. Now she could only look back with a sigh when she recalled the frightened, broken young woman she had still been when she’d first met Raj.
